Antisthenes

« who are just as well as brave.

The most indispensable item of knowledge Cyrus of Persia acquires is to unlearn what is evil ( fr.

21 ).

Few specific examples of appropriate exertions survive.

A bad reputation is said to be good and 'equal to exertion' ( Diogenes Laertius, VI 11 ).

The sayings ascribed to Antisthenes indicate a strong tendency (congenial to Stoicism) to redraw concepts like kinship and friendship in terms of moral notions such as justice andgoodness, or to prefer the candour of an enemy to the blandishments of flatterers.

Similarly, the law of virtuedisplaces the established laws of the city as the imperative the wise person will obey.

Antisthenes representswisdom as what enables people to make everything work for them, so that nothing is any longer ‘alien'.

Thisphilosophy of life is interpreted in terms of the Stoic doctrine that virtue is self-sufficient in Diogenes Laertius'doxography ( VI 11 ).

Antisthenes' views on pleasure attracted quotation by later authors.

Most popular was: ‘I would rather be mad than feel pleasure' ( Diogenes Laertius, VI 3; fr.

108 ).

Other texts reveal a more nuanced position: pleasure is a good if it does not require subsequent repentance (fr.

110); ‘there is no pleasure in asymposium without concord or in riches without virtue' ( fr.

93 ); ‘we should prefer the pleasure after, not before, exertions' ( fr.

113 ).

The power of sex provoked the comment: ‘ I would shoot down Aphrodite if I could apprehend her, because she has corrupted many of our fine and good women' ( fr.

109 ).

But his most notorious remark on the subject sounds thoroughly Cynic: one should sleep with ‘those women who will be grateful' ( VI 3 ), interpreted by Xenophon ( Symposium 4.38) as recommending as entirely sufficient immediate satisfaction of physical desire with women who have nobody else to want them.

When the doxography in Diogenes Laertius reports that for the sake ofhaving children the wise man will marry, ‘sleeping with the women whose nature is best suited' ( VI 11 ), the plural gives cause for suspicion that Antisthenes' amoral advice has been bowdlerized in the interests of moral propriety.Scholars have harboured hopes of recovering from Xenophon more substantial tracts of Antisthenian moral argumentthan these brief maxims and summaries.

A long speech on the sufficiency of a frugal life provided we possess richesin the soul is put in his mouth in the Symposium (4.34-44 ).

This is very likely a free reworking of genuine Antisthenian ideas.

But other attempts to identify specific Antisthenian material in the Memorabilia , even if it derives inspiration from his view of Socrates and of philosophy, have gone unproven.

4 Language and logos Several texts credit Antisthenes with advancing the claim that contradiction is an impossibility ( frs 47-9 ).

One story makes controversy with Plato about the claim the occasion for Antisthenes' composition of his dialogue Satho (Diogenes Laertius, III 25, VI 16 ): the title was intended as a satirical play on the name 'Plato' (fr.

37) - it means 'prick'.

The argument that no one can contradict anyone else carries resonances of the Sophists.

ForProtagoras(§3) it was a consequence of the relativity of truth.

Plato has the Sophist Dionysodorus derive it from the premise that the logos or account of each thing must say that thing as it is.

So if I succeed in saying the logos of some particular thing, you cannot be referring to that same thing at all if you attempt to contradict.

According toAristotle Antisthenes followed Dionysodorus' line of reasoning: 'nothing could be said except by its own (Greekoikeios ) logos , one to one - from which it followed that contradiction is impossible, and one might almost say falsehood in general' ( Metaphysics 1024b32-4; fr.

49 ).

It is tempting to connect Antisthenes' premise about 'its own logos ' with Diogenes Laertius' information that ‘he was the first to define logos , saying: " logos is what reveals the what it is or was "' (VI 3 ).

Scholars have disputed whether logos here should be taken as 'statement' or 'definition'. Statement has been thought to be too weak a notion to capture something that reveals the what it is or was .

But if the connection just proposed is correct, any statement that succeeds in being about some particular thing will bea true account of that thing as it is and as nothing else is, and such a statement will therefore satisfy the terms ofAntisthenes' definition (or statement).

His position on logos resembles the view of names ascribed to Cratylus in Plato's Cratylus .

Similarities with the 'dream' theory of names in Plato's Theaetetus , which actually speaks of oikeios logos (202a), have also been canvassed in the past, but not much illumination either of the dialogue or of Antisthenes' views has been achieved by the comparison.

Despite affinities between this Antisthenian material andpositions argued by Sophists and others in Plato's dialogues, it may well be that Antisthenes conceived of himself asexplicating the philosophy of Socrates in logic as he did for ethics.

Epictetus attributes to Antisthenes the dictum:'The starting-point for education is the examination of onomata (words or names)' ( Discourses , I 17.12 ) and follows it with a very similar remark ascribed to Xenophon's Socrates.

Since Socrates was constantly asking the question:'What is X?', it would be natural for Antisthenes to want to clarify what kind of answer would in principle meet the inquiry.

There is evidence that he specifically attacked Plato's assumption that what Socrates wanted was adefinition .

Aristotle, discussing the requirements of a good definition, says at one point: There is a certain timeliness in the difficulty raised by the Antisthenians and similarly uneducated persons, namely, that it is impossible to definewhat a thing is (because, it is claimed, a definition is a long logos ), whereas it can be explained what sort of thing it is, for example it can be explained that silver is like tin, but not what silver is.

(Metaphysics 1043b23-8 ) (A 'long logos ' refers to an evasive rigmarole told, for example, by a slave to conceal the truth.) It is obviously difficult to reconcile Antisthenes' doctrine of logos with the proposal that the most an attempt at saying what something is can achieve is explanation of what it is like.

Perhaps Antisthenes was arguing ad hominem : given Plato's wrong assumption that one can reveal the nature of things in terms not special to such things but common to otherthings, a comparison is the best one can do - brief and to the point, if not a proper logos .

Some have concluded that the only statement that could qualify as a logos under Antisthenian rules would be a tautology.

It is hard to believe this was his intention, not least because of evidence of exploitation of the idea of oikeios logos in his rhetorical theory ( fr.

51 ).

But further progress in interpretation is crippled by the complete absence in our sources of any explicit examples of an Antisthenian logos , except for his logos of logos itself.. »